• Inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, academics from the U. of Santiago are developing a model, based on a mathematical theory that defines in minutes an action plan to deal with disasters. They published a paper about this research in the indexed journal "International Journal of Computers, Communications & Control."

It has been two years since the earthquake in Japan happened. This catastrophe caused more than 15,000 deaths and the most important nuclear disaster of the 21st century: the Fukushima Nuclear Plant explosion. This disaster demonstrated the great amount of time required to determine an action plan to cope with these events and the consequent risk for human lives.

This kind of situations led researchers from our University to find a model that could improve these response times. The project manager is Oscar Vasquez, industrial engineer graduated in this University; he has a Master’s degree, from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and currently he is a  Ph.D. candidate at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI. He works with Dr. Juan Sepúlveda, director of the Department of Industrial Engineering, and the academics Miguel Alfaro and Luis Valenzuela-Osorio. Together, they published a paper about this research in the indexed journal "International Journal of Computers, Communications & Control."

The title of the paper written by the research team, composed of industrial and electrical engineers, was "Disaster response project planning: a resolution method based on a theoretical model of games.” The research was published in April by the specialized journal.

Vasquez says the method is a good and fast solution to the problem of assigning activities among a number of available resources in disaster environments. Based on the mathematical theory of “game", they seek to deal with computer applications that are currently used to solve these situations. This is achieved by finding the balance point as part of a theoretical game where activities and resources are the players.

The researcher adds: "Getting a good answer just in seconds is a key issue in disaster situations, considering that the computational complexity of the problem might involve obtaining the optimal solution in hours or even days, a period of time in which the increasing disaster might cause the loss of human lives and infrastructure."

The results of the proposed model showed a difference of 15 percent in relation to the optimal solution, but less than 1 percent in relation to the time required by last generation software. "The idea behind this kind of environment is to save as many lives as possible, and this is achieved if  less time is used in order to give a good answer to the problem”, the specialist says.

Currently, the team is improving the resolution method, defining new subroutines and starting players. Preliminary results have shown a reduction of the gap between their results and the optimal solution, with a difference of only 9 percent.

By Lorena Jimenez